STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

For when you step upon yourself, sacrificing your own needs

The sky shall come, present itself, beneath your humble feet.

(Rahman Baba, 1650 – 1715 A.D)

In 1993, Greg Mortenson stumbled his way across Korphe – a village high up in the Karakoram mountains after a failed attempt to climb K2. The villagers took him in and nursed him back to health over a few weeks in which he came to learn more about his benefactors and their harsh lives. His encounters with the village children, watching them practice their school lessons by writing with a stick in the dirt motivated him to help in his own way. A trauma nurse by profession, Greg treated the impoverished villagers on occasion for their minor ailments – thus earning himself the name Doctor Greg. The village chief, Haji Ali acted as his main host and over the course of his stay they developed a friendship based on mutual respect and the desire to improve the lives of those around them.
Read the rest of this entry »

Entrepreneur types will tell you that every problem is an opportunity in disguise. If that were true, Pakistan would be the “land of opportunity”. But are they wrong when they say it? Nearly all of Pakistan’s problems can be monetized into successful businesses that make someone money and solve someone’s problems. Yet there is a serious shortage of people who view things that way. Read the rest of this entry »

The etymology of the word “education” is found in the Latin word educare, meaning to “bring up” or to “bring out”. The reality of our system of education today is that it has less to do with “bringing out” and more with “putting in”. Students are exposed to a wealth of knowledge but the pedagogy prevalent in our schools values the regurgitation and memorization of facts, rather than development of an individual’s unique abilities grounded in those facts. This article makes the case for an alternate reality argued and advocated by Ken Robinson, a prominent proponent of creativity in education, in his TED talks.
Read the rest of this entry »

Entrepreneurship is an attitude. It’s the passion of creation. It’s an outlook on solving problems. It’s the embodiment of human resilience. It’s the vision of crossing the chasm. Sound fantastic? So, why don’t more people start (or work at) startups? Statistics stack the odds against most startups with about one out of ten chances of succeeding, and an even smaller chance to make it really big. But most failed entrepreneurs will tell you that they don’t regret having tried. To understand why, I will present a series of articles covering various topics related to startups and would like readers who are actively engaged in startups or have opinions on related subjects to come forward and contribute or collaborate. As a part of this thread, I will be presenting a few articles covering the experiences of successful and budding entrepreneurs — what better place to find answers than the life stories of people who took the plunge. Read the rest of this entry »

The First Annual Pakistan Blog Awards were awarded in Karachi on 28th May, 2010. STEP was honored to be  the recipient of the award in the Best Education Blog category. We are honored and delighted, mostly because we had some very worthy contenders in our category — we encourage our readers to visit and support their efforts in this domain too. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is heavily influenced by Paul Lockhart’s brilliant article, ‘A mathematician’s lament’. I only hope to add my experiences as a Pakistani student to back his stance in the debate over Mathematics Education.

Throughout my life I have hated mathematics with a passion. I hated its rules and notations. I hated the fact that I had absolutely no say in whatever was going on in the class. I just had to sit there and listen to my math teacher go on and on about formulas, notations needed to write these formulas, practice questions which would help us memorize these formulas and eventually “practical problems” which were supposed to exhibit the relevance of these formulas in everyday life although even the eight year-old me could tell that these were merely the same practice questions loosely disguised in the most unlikely of social situations known to man. And frankly, I didn’t care. I didn’t care where x was, or how much older Mary was than her brother Mark or when train A would reach London. As far as I was concerned math was an obsolete science to which I didn’t want to contribute to and which, for the most part, didn’t really want me to contribute to it anyway.

Therefore it comes as a surprise to many people that I am currently a Computer Science major focusing on theoretical computer science, which is basically a branch of mathematics. I, who had once famously given a speech to my seventh-grade math class about the pointlessness of mathematics, am now the one trying to explain to other people the beauty of Erdos’ brilliant proofs. And it all started with the following beautiful proof of the infinity of prime numbers:

For any finite set  {p_1,p₂…p_r} of primes consider the number n= p_1..p_2..p₃…p_r +1. This n has a prime divisor p but this is not one of the {p_1,p₂…p_r}, otherwise p would be a divisor of n and the product  p_1..p_2..p₃…p_{r ,} and thus also of the difference n-( p_1..p_2..p₃…p_r) =1, which is impossible.  So a finite set {p_1,p₂…p_r} cannot be the collection of all prime numbers.

I first heard of this proof in the first lecture of a discrete mathematics course I took during my sophomore year at university. The instructor didn’t even write the proof down, with all its messy set notation. He just told us about the idea of putting the prime numbers together in a group and showed us what goes wrong if we assume the group to be finite. At first I thought this was one of those introductory shenanigans professors deploy in the first class to get students interested. How could something so simple be counted as math? Where were the fancy symbols and the list of variables with their definitions? Where was the list of steps used to reach the conclusion? Where were the ten similar questions I needed to solve at home for practice? This was simply a clever idea used to solve a problem. Surely, this couldn’t be math! But, as I have learnt in the past year, this is basically what math is: a set of simple ideas used to solve problems. Sometimes the problems can be simplified to older problems for which people have already come up with solutions. Sometimes ideas which have been used to solve a certain problem can be used to solve an unrelated problem. But the simplicity of the process remains intact. It is the ‘idea’ which is at the heart of all mathematics, and to come up with ideas you just need creativity (and maybe a pencil and a notebook).

If a course can change the path of a person’s life, then this discrete math course changed mine. In the course of nine weeks, I was introduced to the kind of math I hadn’t even known existed. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like a robot while doing math. I actually had to think about the problems and figure out strategies for solving them. While I was introduced to techniques like induction and graph theory, for the most part my assignments and exams required me to come up with my own strategies based on these techniques and my own logical arguments and common sense. Math was like an elaborate game and finally I felt like it actually wanted me to take part.

So, this brings us to the central question: why did I, and countless other students, hate elementary and high school math? What needs to be done to make mathematics more interesting to students? Although I do not have any experience teaching mathematics, I do remember the reasons why I hated it so much and know exactly what eventually made me realize that I wanted to study a branch of mathematics as my major. For the sake of this article, I am going to ignore factors which affect all subjects alike and focus on why math has become such a hated subject.

Looking back at my years of struggling with high school math the first word that comes to mind is boredom. And this was not caused by a lack of interest in school because I was generally a very enthusiastic kid. I loved studying languages, history, and science. It was just math that I dreaded. And looking back at the way math is taught it comes as no surprise. While all other subjects are taught as an amalgamation of the history, foundations, rules and applications of the subject, math is mainly limited to the rules of the subject. Take a typical sixth grade science class. I remember learning about the effect of different factors on the rate of evaporation by placing different shaped beakers filled with water all over the school campus. What followed was a memorable class in which we all had mock “evaporation races” as we timed the beakers to see which one would lose its water first.It was only once we had made our own conclusions about which factors affected evaporation, that our teacher explained Brownian motion to us. She also mentioned factors such as surface area and wind-speed, which most of us had been able  to conclude for ourselves based on the observations we had made.

Now compare this to a typical sixth grade math class. Looking back, sixth grade was when some of the most wonderful mathematical concepts were introduced to us. It was in the sixth grade that we first encountered the idea of a variable and started to really analyze shapes. Statistics was introduced, and we started manipulating probabilities to get results which even now give me the feeling of being able to predict the future. But in the midst of all these amazing ideas, this is how a typical math class would go:

Teacher: An isosceles triangle is a triangle which has two sides of equal length. Okay?

Students: YES!

Teacher: So what is an isosceles triangle?

Students: A TRIANGLE WHICH HAS TWO SIDES OF EQUAL LENGTH !

And you can bet one of the questions on the progress test would be: “What is an isosceles triangle?”. In such a situation who would be interested in math? And these are not just two extreme examples I have mentioned to prove my point. Science that year continued to keep us hooked: we grew plants in inky water, caught insects in jars, experimented with mirrors and discovered the material we were supposed to learn, while in math we moved on to triangles which had no sides of equal length (I honestly don’t remember what they were called, though I think it begins with an s) and other lexical atrocities.

You may argue that science is an extreme example and that math just doesn’t have the exciting material needed to keep students hooked. While science teachers can use models, take their students outside or perform simple experiments to demonstrate their material, math teachers have nothing to interest a group of thirty kids. Not only do I disagree with this, I actually claim that it is the other way round and that it is the math teachers that have it good. While science teachers need extensive (and often non-available) funding to buy lab equipment and take their students out on field trips, all a math teacher needs are thirty pencils and notebooks. And how does he keep them interested? Well, he actually asks them to do some math. Do you remember the puzzle we probably all tried as kids in which we had to draw a house without lifting our pencils. That is just a simple example of a Eulerian path. And those complicated strategies for winning card games that our older siblings tried to explain to us were mostly simple applications of probability. The tower of rings of increasingly small diameters which we had to shift to another peg is the most common example given for recursive algorithms. The list of interesting mathematical problems which we solved willingly as kids is endless. Nim, Hex, magic tricks, and riddles in which we had to find loopholes in logical arguments are all example of the math we enjoyed as children and it is these problems which should be bought to the classroom to make math classes more interesting.

Another issue which I find with the way mathematics is taught, which is closely related to the first, is the extreme and almost exclusive emphasis on the utterly mundane aspects of mathematics. Take the isosceles triangle example above. Would it really have mattered if we had called the triangles, “triangles with two equal sides”? Maybe shortened to TWTES (pronounced tevtes). What’s important are the properties of these triangles. Instead of asking a child to spend time trying to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of this weird word, she should be asked to think about how they are made, and how the angles inside this triangle are related to each other. I am pretty sure if a child made a dozen different TWTES’ she would figure out most of their  properties for herself and she would actually enjoy the mental excursion of discovering these properties instead of hastily be given a list of them in the last fifteen minutes of class.

Admittedly, there are some terms and jargon that a student of mathematics must learn in order for the classes to be held smoothly and for the students to eventually take part in the wider mathematical discourse. But no other subject puts even half of the emphasis that math places on its lexicon. Take the example of chemistry. If a subject has the right to focus on terminology it is chemistry, with it’s multitude of  symbols, chemical formulas and specific reactions. But not once do I remember a chemistry teacher reciting the names of the elements along with their atomic symbols. Instead, we focused on the elements and their reactions and any time we needed help deciphering a symbol we could simply look it up on the huge periodic table taped to the classroom wall. Maybe that is what mathematics needs: a periodic table of shapes and functions which would be taped to the wall of every classroom. Then, children all over the world could forget about mathematical terminology and actually do some math.

And by ‘doing math’ I don’t mean the mindless repetition, or solving exercise problems at the end of every chapter. As a result of school mathematics, most people end up believing math is the application of known rules to problems that we know the rules can solve. That is the job of an accountant or a cashier or an insurance planner. A mathematicians  job is much simpler. He must come up with the rules that other people are to use. When faced with a problem, he is not told that it can be solved using the second trigonometric identity; that is what he must figure out. And while this is harder than simply applying a set of rules, the result of coming up with a solution is infinitely more rewarding. You can compare the two as the difference between the joy a child feels in having an adult place him on a bike and push him along, and the joy he feels when he races through the park himself. It is hard to teach him how to ride and it might take him ages to learn but all parents understand that the end result is worth it. Math teachers should definitely do the same with their students.

And if difficulty was such a major barrier, why doesn’t it stop teachers of other subjects from trying to get their students to appreciate the beauty of their fields? By the end of high school most of us have faced the toughest aspects of most of the other subjects. We have read Iqbal’s poetry and critiqued it with our peers. We have a deep understanding of how the major systems of the body work. We have built electrical devices and have made original pieces of art in a range of different mediums. Then, why is it that most of us only experience the joy of coming up with a true mathematical proof well into our undergraduate programs? Surely there is something wrong going on here.

In Fall 2008, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) opened its doors to 150 freshmen students to study science and engineering at its brand new School of Science and Engineering (SSE). Offering undergraduate degrees in Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering,  and graduate degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics, LUMS SSE had much grander plans than most Pakistani universities. Indeed, SSE envisions to be not just a “successful research university”, but “perhaps an MIT, Stanford or a Caltech for Pakistan.” To realize this vision, SSE was able to raise a significant amount of money Read the rest of this entry »

“Get good education and move to a bad neighborhood” was a constant advice I received from my advisor over the last six years that I spent at the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) as a Fulbright scholar for my MS and PhD programs in Computer Science. Read the rest of this entry »

The history of Special Education in Pakistan goes back farther than the history of Pakistan itself. With the earliest school for disabled children established in Lahore in 1906, it has now been more than a century since institutions dedicated to the education of special children have been in operation. Since then the development of special education institutions has been anything but smooth, coming to almost a complete standstill for quite some time after the partition of India. Rapid developments started in the 80’s when 1981 was declared the International Year of the Disabled by the United Nations. Currently, a network of federal, provincial, and NGO-based institutions provide education to approximately 24000 special children, which is hardly 4% of the total population of children with special needs in Pakistan. What are the reasons behind this shortfall in academic institutions for those with special needs? How can this shortfall be erased efficiently? How are the current institutions performing? And what needs to be done to improve their performance?

We posed these and some other questions to Sara Chak, a Developmental Therapist working in the Developmental Pediatrics Department at the Children’s Hospital, Lahore. Sara has a Masters in Special Education from Punjab University and has been working with special children for the last six years. Currently, she works with the parents or guardians of children with special needs.

STEP:The Special Education system relies on the detection of disabilities in infants and young children. In Pakistan, how advanced is the system of detection of disabilities which would lead a child to be described as having special needs?

Sara Chak: Most disabilities such as Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, bone defects, and epilepsy are identified at birth and most hospitals in Pakistan currently have an advanced system of assessing newborns for these conditions. Some disabilities, such as visual and hearing impairments, are diagnosed later on in the child’s life, but again the pediatric departments of most hospitals have the resources to perform tests to diagnose these disabilities. The problem, of course, lies in the fact that most children in Pakistan, are not born in hospitals. Traditional midwives are unable to assess newborns for theses disabilities and thus their detection is delayed, sometimes indefinitely.
One area of assessment where Pakistan lags behind is the psychological testing of those with visual or hearing impairments. Currently no institution in Pakistan currently provides tests for the intellectual assessment of these students, which hinders the academic progress of these children.

STEP: What is the next step taken once a child with special needs has been identified?

SC: This depends on the institution the child is taken to by his or her guardians and the recommendations of those they consult, usually the doctor who diagnosed the disability. Here at the Children’s hospital we have two learning centers: the two-hour learning center and the four-hour learning center. The two-hour learning center is mostly for children under the age of five, where each child is taught on a one-on-one basis. Apart from teaching the child, the teacher focuses on preparing the child to work in a group environment. In the four hour learning center, group teaching sessions take place everyday. These are continued as long as we feel that the child is benefiting from them. Once we feel that the child has reached his or her learning potential, we guide him/her through an occupational placement program. In this process, we help the child figure out a skill he or she would like to learn and one which we think the child is capable of doing. We refer him/her to vocational training institutes for people with special needs. Thus our aim is to make him/her an independent member of the society.

STEP: What kinds of jobs do these children usually end up with?

SC: All kinds. Traditionally, they went to vocational training centers to learn embroidery, woodwork, etc. But, recently two of my students trained to work at fast food restaurants and are currently working as part of the service staff at these restaurants.

STEP:Which other institutions are currently providing Special Education?

SC: Currently there is mixture of institutions. There are government-run institutions, non-governmental charity organizations, and private institutions. But the number of such institutions is not enough to cater to the demand. And these institutions are usually concentrated in the urban centers of Pakistan.

STEP:What major changes do you think are required in the Special Education sector?

SC: Firstly, I think the training of special education teachers needs to be altered. Currently in Pakistan the only degree offered in Special Education is a Masters degree. No other degree or diploma even has Special Education in its syllabus. In my opinion, Special Education should be introduced as a subject as early as possible. In other countries it is offered as a high-school level subject. For example, Special Education is an O-Level subject but this is not offered to students in Pakistan. The B.Ed degree that most teachers have should certainly require that the holder have some training in dealing with special children. A two-year course is not enough for a person to learn the intricacies of dealing with these children and making special education part of the B.Ed degree would increase the pool of teachers available to teach at Special Education institutions. In fact, if the society as a whole is to learn to accept and include those with special needs, we need to introduce the concept of special needs to children at a primary or secondary school level.

The Masters degree itself needs to be extended to a three year program and should include a year long mandatory internship. Currently, this internship is only a few months long and in my opinion this just isn’t enough. Teaching Special children is a skill best learned in an actual school, and thus greater on-field experience is needed to improve the quality of the graduates.

Secondly the institutions themselves need some changes in the way they are run. It is sad to see when the government offers excellent resources for Special Education but nobody knows how to use them. An example of this is the automatic Braille translation machine. Many institutions have them but they are not being used to their maximum potential. While they could be used to automatically translate large amounts of important material, very few people know how to use them leading them to be used marginally for manually translating text. Teachers are not taught how to operate them, it is a mechanics job to do so. Thus either teachers should be trained how to use these resources or trained personnel should be available to them.

Teachers themselves should pass through a vigorous screening procedure. Due to the mentioned lack of training in special education, most teachers in these schools have no experience or qualifications in teaching Special Children. Thus they have very little knowledge of their physical, psychological, or emotional needs. Another change which is happening on a global level but will take time to be implemented in Pakistan is the elimination of Special Education institutions altogether. Mainstreaming has almost completely replaced Special Education institutions in the developed world. Laws are in place which allow no school to reject a student on the basis of a disability. This way every school has to be prepared to handle a child with special needs. The structure of the schools needs to be such that allows special children to maneuver easily, they have teachers trained to deal with these children and other resources such as special computers and books are available in all schools. The idea of isolating these children is no longer morally or socially acceptable.

STEP: Could you elaborate on the concept of mainstreaming. Has this been adopted by schools in Pakistan?

SC: Mainstreaming defies the idea that children with special needs need to be segregated from other children. There are many benefits that come with doing this. First of all the special child does not feel isolated from the society. This makes it easier for them to become contributing members of the society. By segregating these children we only encourage their role as social outcasts. At this point, some private schools do admit children with special needs but in my experience, the facilities they have are far from satisfactory. They usually allocate a separate room for these children which nullifies the purpose of mainstreaming altogether.

STEP: An advantage of mainstreaming would be the wider acceptance of people with physical or mental disabilities in society. How far do you think the lack of this acceptance is a problem currently?

SC: This is a huge problem in Pakistan. As a therapist, I deal with special children everyday who are intentionally or unintentionally hurt by strangers, peers, and even their own family members. For example, those with visual or hearing impairments are often dealt with as if they have a mental disability, hampering their academic and social development. Even family members are guilty of ridiculing these children. A common example is that of children with Down Syndrome. They are often highly excited by music and can’t help moving enthusiastically when music is played. Family members will use this “trick” to entertain themselves and play music at odd times knowing the child will not be able to restrain himself from dancing. This ridicule has deep repercussions on the child’s development. We need to become mature as a society and learn how to deal with those with special needs in an accepting and respectful manner.

STEP:What are the opportunities available to people with special needs in higher education?

SC: Most universities do not discriminate against applicants because of their disabilities. I know for a fact that there are students with disabilities studying in GCU and FC College. But the number of such students is few. You have to understand that even though there are opportunities available to students to gain higher education, very few have access to good quality primary and secondary education which would make them eligible for higher education.

STEP: Ending on a positive note, could you mention some of the success stories of Special Education in Pakistan?

SC: A major positive step taken by the Musharraf government was to open the CSS examinations to those with special needs. They were allowed assistance in the examination and thus the civil service has now been opened to these people. This is a major step in the right direction since it proves that with the right assistance, those with special needs can be as contributing members of society as those without.

Rising Sun Institute, LRBT, Children’s Hospital are examples of special education institutes that are making a difference. STEP would like to laud their efforts and encourage readers to contribute to institutions like these which are providing education and training to those with special needs in any way they can.

STEP: Informed, perhaps, by your experiences as a student at MIT during the Vietnam War, you have spoken in favor of re-establishing student unions in Pakistani Universities. Could you briefly make the case for re-instituting student unions in Pakistan?

PH: Meaningful discussions on social, cultural, and political issues must be brought back to campuses. Young people are idealists; in fact, there is no other way for them unless they are brain dead. They naturally dream of what a good society is; a society that is way better than what they have inherited from their elders. So, it is perfectly healthy for students to have a self-image of being agents for positive change. Once aware, they soon realize that individuals count for little — only organized actions do. But organized actions require a culture of civilized debate. In my 36 years of teaching at Quaid-e-Azam University, I have never felt that rational, civilized debate with or between students is impossible. Of course, there have been exceptional situations, such as after the 1998 nuclear tests, but students will generally listen to the other side in a civilized way.
Read the rest of this entry »